- Two U.S. researchers say the compensation Russia has promised for those injured and killed could cost $26 billion.
- This represents about 6% of the country's 2024 budget of $414 billion.
- The researchers derived the figure based on open-source data and Russia's own laws.
The two researchers estimate that the Kremlin will need to spend around 2.3 trillion rubles ($26 billion) in lump-sum payments it has promised to families of wounded and killed soldiers in Ukraine.
This amounts to about 6% of Russia's total 2024 budget of 36.6 trillion rubles ($414 billion).
The figure was calculated by Thomas Lattanzio, a public service research fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and Harry Stevens, a research associate at the National Interest Center, a US think tank.
In a commentary in War on the Rocks, they used estimates from French and British officials to estimate Russian casualties in the Ukraine war: they put the total at 400,000 wounded and killed, of which 100,000 were military casualties.
Russian law entitles families of fallen soldiers to a lump sum payment of 8.8 million rubles, with a further 5 million provided by a bill passed in 2022, shortly after the war began.
Combined with additional payments of 1 to 3 million rubles from local governments, most households will receive a lump sum total of about 14 million rubles ($158,000), Lattanzio and Stevens wrote.
Wounded soldiers will also receive 3 million rubles under the 2022 decree.
“Simple math suggests that the one-time payments would amount to 900 billion rubles for the injured and at least 1.4 trillion rubles for the families of the dead, totalling 2.3 trillion rubles,” Lattanzio and Stevens wrote.
The lump sum cost would be “staggering,” they wrote.
Representatives for the Russian Defense Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent by Business Insider outside regular business hours.
Still, it is not clear whether Russia has consistently provided lump-sum payments to wounded soldiers and next of kin of dead soldiers.
Reuters reported in June 2022 that some soldiers, including four interviewed by the news agency, were struggling to receive compensation after being injured on the battlefield.
In November, Radio Free Europe's Russia investigative unit, Sistema, found that several Russian contract soldiers and the families of victims have yet to receive their compensation, despite trying to get it.
In April, Ukraine released recordings of phone calls it said were intercepted by a Russian soldier in which Russia claimed to have designated the victims “missing in action” and was refusing to pay full compensation to their families.
Ukraine claimed in June that Russian casualties had reached 515,000, but Moscow has not issued regular updates on soldier casualties.
Mediazona, an independent Russian media outlet that tracks the names of those killed in the war, estimated in a July 5 update that between 106,000 and 140,000 Russian soldiers have been killed, including 39,000 this year.
Researchers say annual cost of PTSD treatment is 2% of budget
Lattanzio and Stevens also estimated how much it costs Russia to treat military personnel for post-traumatic stress disorder, coming up with an estimate of about $15,000 per patient treated per year.
They used figures for the cost of treating PTSD in the United States, adjusted them to Russian purchasing power parity, and assumed that 500,000 Russian veterans suffer from some form of “post-traumatic stress disorder” as a result of the war.
In total, treating war-related PTSD costs 660 billion rubles ($7.4 billion) per year, roughly 2 percent of Russia's total budget.
Russia plans to spend almost a third of its total budget for 2024 on defense, or about 10.8 trillion rubles ($122 billion).
This is nearly double defense spending for 2023, with much of the money expected to go toward weapons production.
Many observers say this bias towards military spending indicates Russia intends to fight the Ukraine war for the long haul.
“By betting everything on growing military spending, the Kremlin is plunging its economy into a perpetual war trap,” analysts at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Russia and Eurasia Center wrote.
